Cartier
Cartier holds 188 watches in this library, in ten collections, and is the only brand here whose catalogue begins with the shape of the case. Fifty-seven per cent are gold or platinum and 27 per cent are hand-wound.
Collections
Clé de Cartier
Santos de Cartier
Drive de Cartier
Ronde de Cartier
Crash de Cartier
Tortue
Ballon Bleu de Cartier
The Ballon Bleu is Cartier's round watch of 2007, named for the sapphire cabochon on its crown and the curved guard that wraps around it like a bubble.
Tank
The Tank is the rectangular watch Louis Cartier designed in 1917.
Rotonde de Cartier
The Rotonde de Cartier is the round case Cartier uses for its fine-watchmaking movements.
Calibre de Cartier
The Calibre de Cartier was the round sports watch Cartier built in 2010 around its first in-house automatic movement, the 1904-PS MC.
About Cartier
Louis-François Cartier took over his master's Paris workshop in 1847, and the house was a jeweller first; its watches came from the grandsons. In 1904 Louis Cartier made a wristwatch for the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who could not take his hands off the controls to check a pocket watch, and the Santos went on sale in 1911. The Tortue followed in 1912, the Tank in 1917, its brancards drawn from the tracks of a Renault tank, and the Crash in 1967 from Cartier's London workshop. The watches were long powered by others, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Piaget above all, and the Must de Cartier quartz of the 1970s made the Tank a mass product. The manufacture in La Chaux-de-Fonds opened in 2001, and the 1904 MC of 2010, named for the Santos year, was the first automatic movement of its own.
The catalogue here reflects the modern range. The Ballon Bleu of 2007, the round watch whose crown sits under a sapphire cabochon in a bridge, is the largest collection at 51 watches; the Tank is 40, the Calibre de Cartier that introduced the 1904 MC is 38, and the Rotonde de Cartier, where the mystery hours and flying tourbillons live, is 33. The Drive, the Ronde and the Clé make up the rest.
The 1904-PS MC powers 40 watches here and its chronograph version, the 1904-CH MC, 13; the ETA 2892, which the 2892 piece describes, is still present as the 049 on 53. The hand-wound side is the Tank Louis Cartier's 1917 MC, the 430 MC on a Piaget base, and the 9452 MC flying tourbillon with the Hallmark of Geneva. Sixty-six per cent of the catalogue is automatic and 5 per cent quartz.
The median case is 40 mm and 11 mm thick, with 42 mm the most common size. Twenty-eight per cent of the watches are steel and 13 per cent two-tone; 8 per cent are chronographs and 5 per cent tourbillons. Water resistance is a dress rating, a median of 30 m, the Calibre de Cartier Diver at 300 m the exception. Seven per cent are limited editions, half have a display back, and the rarity median is 4.